All Caps - Case Convention for WADs?

[princetontiger]

Is it standard to capitalize PWAD/IWAD files?

 

IIRC, the doom collector's edition had lowercase filenames for the four iwads: doom.wad, doom2.wad, tnt.wad, plutonia.wad. I know we're digging into semantics here.

Edited November 29, 2022 by princetontiger

[Doomy__Doom]

> PWAD

A quick look at my wads folder, which isn't even that big, gives a decisive "lol no". There's CamelCase, UPPERCASE, lowercase, Underscore_Fiesta and dash-split. And that's before we get to how different versions are appended to the name.

[Lucius Wooding]

I know there has been some reason to use a 4 character name for PWADs for some kind of compatibility in old versions, but the capitalization is a stylistic preference only. Personally I made a cool abbreviation for my long map name to a snappy 2 characters, and one was a number so it wasn't much of a dilemma.

[MFG38]

36 minutes ago, Doomy__Doom said:

CamelCase

 

Isn't camel-case where you capitalize the initials of every word except the first one? I know that's a pretty popular naming convention for variables in programming.

[Doomy__Doom]

24 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

Isn't camel-case where you capitalize the initials of every word except the first one? I know that's a pretty popular naming convention for variables in programming. 

Camel case can work either way, sometimes also called UpperCamelCase and lowerCamelCase. It's named differently in various style guides: e.g. PascalCase, CapitalizedWords, mixedCase, or something wordy like "mixed case with the first letter lowercase"/"mixed case with the first letter of each internal word capitalized" (thank you Oracle).

[Doomkid]

For what it’s worth, the IWADs and most PWADs being uppercase back in the day (and limited to 8 character titles) was just a byproduct of DOS still being a common operating system at the time. All the CD-ROM versions of Doom, D2 and Final Doom from the 1990s use full uppercase for pretty much all files on the discs, including wads and EXEs.

 

I kinda think they actively changed it for Collector’s Edition in 2001 because it gave a very dated appearance, but that’s just a guess. (Also only the “Doom 3 bonus content” version of CE gives the wads their correct dates, the older pressing dates them at 2001.. just some ultra-dodeca-doomnerd trivia there for you, lol)

[Noiser]

2 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

I know there has been some reason to use a 4 character name for PWADs for some kind of compatibility in old versions

DOS doesn't like long file names. It can only show 8 letters or characters, otherwise there will be a "~1" sign at the end to indicate the name was cropped.

Example: 
That's one of the reasons why many DOS games have short names or abbreviations (Doom, Quake, Wolf3D, Descent, Blood... etc).

Edited November 29, 2022 by Noiser

[HorseJockey]

9 hours ago, Doomy__Doom said:

Underscore_Fiesta

This made me laugh. Maybe showing my ignorance but is that an actual agreed upon name for using underscores in your title or something you came up with?

[Doomy__Doom]

5 hours ago, HorseJockey said:

This made me laugh. Maybe showing my ignorance but is that an actual agreed upon name for using underscores in your title or something you came up with? 

Came up with. There is snake_case, but I've never seen this term used in the context of Mixed_Case, which wads often go for.

 

Speaking of, I also missed the normal human naming - Words With Spaces Between Them.wad :) I tend to immediately replace spaces with underscores in those, so that slipped.

[NiGHTMARE]

When I got a Steam Deck a few months ago, I decided to add shortcuts for some of my favourite wads to the Steam library. It took me a while to realise why several of the wads wouldn't load: in Linux (and hence the Steam Deck OS) everything is case sensitive.

Edited November 30, 2022 by NiGHTMARE

[prfunky]

Case sensitivity, DOS and you...

So, in the Unix/Linux world case of letters matters; it is perfectly legal to have a

directory with the following files in it:

README.TXT

readme.txt

ReadMe.Txt

All of those will refer to a different file!

DOS had no case sensitivity whatsoever, so the above example was impossible

in DOS. If you tried to save a different file from the EDIT.COM text editor and

the file README.TXT already existed, an error would be generated and spit

back at the offending user.

 

Windows 95 began a period where the operating system allowed filenames

which were longer than the, then standard, DOS eight character with three

character extension after the period limits. The operating system itself was still

case-insensitive but became case-preservational. Therefore, all files in this

environment ended up having two filenames! The most common example I can

think of is the notorious Program Files directory. In the confines of the Windows

95 desktop's Explorer program, the name was preserved completely. But if you

were to drop to a command prompt screen and issue the DIR command to list

the root directory of the drive, you would actually see both names listed;

PROGRA~1 followed by Program Files. I might also add that in DOS, having a

space character in a filename was also impossible.

 

Doom was built for DOS ~ 1993

Doom II was built for DOS ~ 1994

 

Long filenames did not exist yet because nobody but Microsoft insiders had a

copy of Windows 95 running yet (codenamed "Chicago", I believe?) Anyhow,

that's why all of the IWADs for Doom default to capital letters. And of course,

any PWADs people made from those early days will also be in all caps.

 

[Worst]

You don't need to worry about case sensitivity, if you write your filenames with Emoji:

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

9 minutes ago, Worst said:

You don't need to worry about case sensitivity, if you write your filenames with Emoji:

What's so bad about the title raygunsurprisetelephonerocketpizzalobster.wad? Is that too long for DOS or something?

[Gez]

It's pretty funny to think that the telephone emoji does not look like any telephone built within the last 20 years. At least it's not a rotary dial that's represented...